Exploring And Promoting Creative Archives

Category Archives: Student workshops

We have an exciting addition to the Epsom Archive at UCA – a large selection of student zines. For the Visual Communication brief, the Graphic Design students were set the task of creating a fanzine (a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest). This brief was given a fashion biased and students could choose from the following themes:

Sustainable fashion

Music and Subculture

Art and Fashion

Superheroes

Showstudio

Trends

Concept stores

Fashion and Architecture

Feminism

Cat-walks

Taste and kitsch

Gender

Cinema

Exploitation

The fanzines are incredibly varied considering the guidelines of each having 20 pages, a 250-word limit and the use of three colours. They are a great resource for anyone researching zines.

March was ‘Women’s History Month’ and a workshop was held for students in Farnham to create a zine inspired by our UCA Archives. The students used information on women’s history from the 1980s/90s and created zines that are on display in the Library at Epsom along with items of interest from the Archive.

There is a scrap book of newspaper clippings from 1962 until 1995 that includes fascinating stories and photographs relating to the Art School.

There are committee minutes that hold a wealth of information about the Art School. Research will uncover the types of courses, staff and student achievements, funding, ethnic monitoring, mergers and government changes.

To view these and other archive items, visit the Epsom Archive on Tuesdays and Thursday between 2pm and 3pm during term times and Saturdays.

I recently undertook a workshop with International Pathways students to work with them on their project ‘Archive Fever’.

This involved analysing archives or artefacts through a subjective and objective response. As part of their brief they had to answer the following questions

A subjective or more emotional response to an art stimulus that has affected you enough on a personal level for you to want to write about it. (1000 words)

A critical response to an artwork, artefact or archive that you would like to evaluate (1500 words). This will constitute the more objective ‘academic essay’

The workshop started off with asking students what they felt ‘subjective’ or ’emotional’ meant to them. We then looked at series of examples both from UCA archives, such as the Rethinking the body project and other archives and artists, such as the archives and artists website produced by Birmingham university.

Students were then asked to choose an item from the archives, namely the Bob Godfrey animation archive, and examples from our institutional archives, and look at the answering the following questions:

What does the image make you feel? (e.g.Happy/sad/confused/surprised/angry)

What part of the image stands out for you? What would you want to write about?

Draw (if you wish) part of the image that interests you and you’d want to talk about

For the latter part students focused in on a particular shape or colour of the item they used, looking, for example, at how they could utilise that image in their own work.

For example Ifueko used an image from the Bob Godfrey archive – drawings of buildings from an animation – Shakespeare Music Hall, and focused on in a particular shape that could be used in Interior Design

Myra looked at the textures and layers of strokes on an image of a tree

Other images included a remake from a student yearbook marking the end of Fine Art in Maidstone in the 80s. The image reminded the student of a dream

Other images by another student looked at tourists that were in Shakespeare Music Hall and scene structure. This is the interpretation.

For the objective essay part I asked the students ‘What is an objective response?’ and ‘What is a critical response?’. We looked at analysing how you might provide an objective response through looking at our archives. I asked them to look at an image, and write down what they would need to know to analyse that image. For example, who took the photo? What were the art movements at the time – did any inspire that image?

We finished up with looking at how you might access archives, and how you might access contextual information